After a little bit of digging and conjecturing, I worked out that the user removed was user llonesmiz.

I dearly bemoan the loss of a great SO contributor, and my (near) lone companion in boost-spirit. I know he had personal reasons for deleting his account, as I have tried to help/talk to him in comments over the last few months.

Now, I'll be honest. I don't like losing the reputation.

On a more principled level I'm trying to work out the following questions:

Is it fair/desirable that a user takes with him all the votes he had cast on account deletion?

In my view, this was a highly respected power user with a lot of reputation in the c++ domain. His votes matter to me. Frequently, he taught me much better ways to do stuff, so I think it is a distinct disservice to the community to wipe his votes.

Should high reputation accounts be deleted instead of being destroyed?

I was going to ask you to provide link to the user's profile :|.
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hjpotter92Mar 22 '13 at 14:24

6

You're misunderstanding delete vs. destroy, both remove all the votes but destroy also removes all the posts. And my feature request to stop deleting all votes for deleted users (meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125740/…) might also be of interest to you.
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Mad ScientistMar 22 '13 at 14:25

How often will a single user's votes make a meaningful difference in the ranking of the answers of any single question? It could happen, but I imagine not very often.
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joranMar 22 '13 at 14:38

16

User in question had "only" 1710 rep which I don't consider high (easily achieved in 1 month). He just casts relatively a lot of votes: at least 2362 upvotes of which 1716 on answers (and thus generating 17K rep). You might want to reframe the question accordingly.
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BalusCMar 22 '13 at 14:43

1

@Chichiray bear in mind that's a month-old cache so numbers could be off a bit
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JNKMar 22 '13 at 14:47

5

Because sockpuppets. How do you distinguish a genuine account from a sock?
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Robert HarveyMar 22 '13 at 14:49

4

@Chichiray I don't feel the question needs reframing. The linked source clearly says "This can only be done to users with a very low reputation, unless you are a StackExchange employee". 1.7k is very clearly not very low reputation. If you think otherwise you might want to check the rep distribution statistics of SO users.
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seheMar 22 '13 at 15:08

17

@joran It's not about losing rep, it's about losing expert opinions. You might have missed the fact that I'm asking about "in principle". I'm far from alone in thinking that legitimate votes cast should not be deleted. I don't care too much about the rep. I care about destruction of knowledge (or at least the quantitative endorsements of it)
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seheMar 22 '13 at 15:12

3

I understood you just fine I think, but I think you didn't understand me at all. My point is that the one vote that a single user contributes to a set of answers usually won't change the impression of which answer was best. (Accepts are a different story though.) My comment had absolutely nothing to do with lost rep. At all. Read it again.
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joranMar 22 '13 at 15:15

3

The case of a long-standing highly respected user requesting self-deletion of their account should be handled differently from a sock puppet being destroyed. (Edit: ah. According to gnat, that was supposed to happen.)
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PëkkaMar 22 '13 at 16:11

7

@sehe: If he just wanted to be gone, why did he ask to be deleted? Personally, asking to be deleted sounds more like rage-quitting to me than merely leaving. If he wanted to leave, just don't come back.
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Nicol BolasMar 22 '13 at 17:10

3 Answers
3

This was our screw-up, and preventing large impact deletes like this will be an addition to the code on our side sometime this week.

For now I've gone through the database and manually undone the delete action on this user's votes, which is the net impact that should have happened if they were moved to the community user...our normal process.

Your rep history (and about 1,300 other users) will no longer reflect this user's deletion.

@Seth I will. (Why the hurry?) Note that this question was a discussion. I agree that consensus has emerged. However, also note that the implementation isn't complete ("preventing...will be...sometime this week"). \@Nick if you prefer to track the status of that over here instead, feel free to mark this as status-complete. I'm happy as long as it receives the attention :)
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seheMar 26 '13 at 22:10

Was the feature actually implemented? I lost a few points with reason "user was removed", so I'd like some feedback here.
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BlaisorbladeJun 22 '13 at 7:56

It is not clear how "large impact" is defined and when this should and shouldn't happen. I lost 80 rep today (not a lot, I know) because user 2875617 was removed. He probably only had a couple hundred rep and 50 or so votes, so I understand this didn't get special treatment, but I am curious as to when such vote-preserving deletion is used. Just browsing through other [matlab] users, I see many people have lost rep, so it does not seem to be a cross-voting user or anything shady like that.
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chappjcNov 16 '13 at 1:30

Just this user? Why not other users as well?
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hexafractionNov 27 '13 at 13:39

@Blaisorblade nope, this pretty much proves the code does not prevent deleting users with thousands of votes.
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Shadow WizardDec 23 '14 at 8:13

The fact that votes weren't preserved indicates either a bug like one that has been confirmed at above post ("bug in our vote auto-invalidation task"), or, maybe, that removal somehow (how?) did not happen "upon their request".

It depends on how you define "highly active". His rep probably didn't qualify him as such.
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Nicol BolasMar 22 '13 at 16:12

13

@NicolBolas if they qualify "highly active" solely by rep, they're on a road to trouble. I for one had thousands votes on Programmers and SO (and MSO, and Workplace) even before I got 2-3K. Dropping stuff I cast if I decide to leave would most certainly muddy some waters (not that it will be my headache though:)
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gnatMar 22 '13 at 16:16

14

"highly active" is subjective/relative. In the boost-spirit tag he was clearly active. He specialized in template metaprogramming and boost-library internals. Those are highly specialized tag and few SO users take the :effort: to answer/read/vote these questions. (In this respect, his votes constitute probably a significant 'weight' in the total vote volumes there)
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:36

3

@sehe Thank you for finally responding to what I actually wrote in my comment. If the user is active in a more marginal tag, this will dramatically increase the likelihood that their votes on any particular question will effect the ordering/perceived usefulness of specific answers. That was what I was trying to get you to expand upon, not rep loss.
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joranMar 22 '13 at 16:38

1

@joran Ok. I can see it now :) I think your point might be so essential to the discussion, it might be worth posting as an answer
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:47

3

It's a manual process - and one which was overlooked in this case. Not to go into detail, but it's probably not robust enough to make this automatic - so we can't ever promise that it will or won't happen, but in cases where the disruption will likely be high we do try to minimize it.
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Shog9♦Mar 22 '13 at 19:45

@Shog9 interesting. Now that you mention that, I feel like moving votes to Community User is sort of a user merge process, the one that goes through Community Team (as explained in February 2013 Moderator Newsletter)... Delicate and complicated stuff, right?
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gnatMar 22 '13 at 19:55

1

It's a little bit different (we've fixed the most obvious/unfortunate side-effect of suddenly giving Community a crapload of votes, but there are almost certainly more subtle ones). At best, it's a hack to work around the fact that we actually do hard delete user accounts - I'm fairly sure it's not something we could do routinely without causing... Interesting problems. The primary concern when merging users is just not inadvertently exposing credentials.
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Shog9♦Mar 22 '13 at 20:34

3

@Shog9 REALLY? Now that takes me by surprise. If there's no way to fix it, then I suggest a safety measure (an alert message) of some kind is order. This is certainly not the first time it happened this way: chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/5540467#5540467 just one very well recorded incident
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seheMar 22 '13 at 20:40

4

@sehe: this case is... exceptional though, both because of the amount of votes involved, and the number of people affected. Deleting users with this much voting activity is very, very rare; as I said before, I don't think it's something we can automate at this point, but... A warning or sanity check of some sort is probably a good idea.
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Shog9♦Mar 25 '13 at 3:19

In my view, this was a highly respected power user with a lot of reputation in the c++ domain. His votes matter to me. Frequently, he taught me much better ways to do stuff, so, if this user cast a vote, I think it is a distinct disservice to the community to wipe his votes.

Voting is, more or less, anonymous. Yes, you can kinda figure out who voted on what, if you really investigate or poll the database directly. But you can't tell just from looking at a question or answer who voted for it. So I don't see how wiping his votes impacts how someone looks at a question/answer he voted on.

Furthermore, the account is deleted. "The community" no longer knows he existed. He has been unpersoned. Nobody in the community can find him or his contributions, let alone his votes.

So I don't see how the community is dis-served here.

Is it fair/desirable that a user takes with him all the votes he had cast on account deletion?

Personally, I don't think that account deletion should be allowed, period. However, if they're going to allow it then yes, they should be completely unpersoned. With the exception of the text they wrote (the primary contribution of a user), the site should be as though they never were here.

And they shouldn't be allowed to have their old accounts, no matter how much they beg.

The reason for this is simple: to discourage people from deleting their accounts. If deletion were painless and/or easily reversible, then people would be doing it more often. Deletion has negative effects. You can't easily find other questions/answers from a user who posted a good question/answer you liked. You can't track a deleted account. And so forth. Even if votes aren't removed, deletion damages Stack Overflow.

So we make deletion hurt. That way, it only gets used in the most critical of circumstances.

Just because the user no longer has an account here does not mean the posts he/she voted on were any less helpful. I believe it is wrong to remove those votes, as the posts they voted on were helpful in the past and the deletion of the user's account does not change that.
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RachelMar 22 '13 at 16:26

@Nicol Bolas: I'm 100% sure this was the user. I have simply checked by revisiting his comments/contributions. Also, it explains perfectly how I was the most impacted, as we shared a common "niche" interest: boost-spirit
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:38

@sehe: I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that this information is not available. You only found out because you know him well and you know his wandering habits. For "the community", he was a guy who voted a lot; nothing more.
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Nicol BolasMar 22 '13 at 16:40

3

I don't care about what Community thinks :) I care about what SO thinks. The real community, that is
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:40

@sehe: Then why do you care if it's a "distinct disservice to the community" or not?
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Nicol BolasMar 22 '13 at 16:40

4

"So I don't see how the community is dis-served here" - he was one of the few contributors both qualified and interested in scrutinizing a niche of questions, the type that take more effort on average. Removing his votes makes it hard for community members to judge whether existing content is worth it's salt, because there is literally too little interest for any significant voting (beyond the 'thank you' votes from the OP)
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:42

1

@sehe: The C++ tag is the seventh-most-popular tag on SO. And virtually every Boost-Spirit question is tagged with it, for obvious reasons. I see no reason why his vote was somehow keeping stuff on that tag from becoming a bunch of zero vote questions and answers. Indeed, skimming through the first page of questions on that tag, I don't see any evidence of the problem you suggest at all.
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Nicol BolasMar 22 '13 at 16:48

@NicolBolas I'm +1 this answer because I do agree that deleting accounts should not really be an option (exceptional "moderational" reasons aside). However, you answer seemed to me to state "I don't think it's relevant". I did disagree there. Which of those two was the strongest message you intended to send?
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seheMar 22 '13 at 16:50

So we make deletion hurt. For everyone other than the person being deleted? If someone wants their account deleted badly enough, I don't see why they would care about the impact of their deletion on others.
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LittleBobbyTablesMar 22 '13 at 18:07

1

@NicolBolas "I don't see any evidence of the problem you suggest at all." - try actively monitoring the feed for a year or two. Then we'll talk again. Seriously, this tag has too few contributors, and frequently I post an answer that goes without a single response for days. I can only conclude that all the c++ regulars just skip on it as "too much effort"/"too specific". This is certainly true of the people I know (they actively refer those questions to me, nevermind I'm subscribed :))
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seheMar 22 '13 at 19:40

@NicolBolas Would you mind repeating your claim ("I don't see any evidence of the problem you suggest at all.") now? I mean, just an example: obvious NARQ sits for 15+hours with ~15 views. I cast the first close vote/comment (and linked it in the lounge to get some traction). I can really conclude none other than you are clearly underestimating the niche effect. (Possibly by over-estimating your own involvement, and that of other c++ frequenters by proxy). And this is only scratching the surface, really. <rant/>
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seheApr 26 '13 at 0:04

1

What's the lesson? "You can delete your account and not only you'll achieve your goal, you'll also take away potentially thousands of reputation points from others!"? Yeah that's seems like a grave consequence for someone who wants to remove their account
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Cat Plus PlusApr 26 '13 at 2:56

2

"It keeps people from removing their accounts for silly, petty reasons." Why would it? They're not affected by any of this in the slightest, they just want their account removed. The reason is not really important here (SO should have a self-service "remove account" button anyway).
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Cat Plus PlusApr 26 '13 at 3:30

6

Because they might not want to have an account here. Why should we make it hard? Any decent site will have self-service account removal functionality. I don't know what crappy Internet forums have to do with this. I thought SO was supposed to be better than those? Account removal is something that should happen when person doesn't want to have an account here any more, and it's nobody business why (there are even laws for this sort of thing I wonder why).
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Cat Plus PlusApr 26 '13 at 3:55